It has been well experienced that a very long term aging such as for 3 to 8 months is required to produce hard cheese having good cheese flavor and taste which can be used as a starting material in the production of process cheese. In view of this, some attempts have been made to produce hard cheese having good flavor and taste quickly, or to brew good cheese flavor concentrate quickly.
For example, these attempts have been disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Nos. 23578/1960 and 38169/1981, and Japanese Patent Laid Open Publication Nos. 15676/1976, and 113869/1984. In each method of these known attempts, milk or cheese curd is used as a starting material and a proteolytic enzyme and/or lipolytic enzyme as well as lactic bacteria are reacted with the starting material. That is, in the known method, the activities of the enzyme and the lactic bacteria are utilized instead of those of mold and bacteria used in a conventional cheese production.
However, in the known method, there are many drawbacks such as difficulty of the production of desired cheese flavor and taste, too strong bitterness, and the production of undesirable soapy flavor. Further, in case of using cheese curd as the starting material, milk whey having very high BOD is unavoidably formed as a by-product and, therefore, practice of such a method is also limited from the viewpoint of disposal of the by-product.